A Flexible Analysis Synthesis Tool (FAST) for studying the characteristic features of emotion in speech

This paper aims to understand the components of speech that contribute to emotion characteristics in speech. Four components of speech (vocal tract, excitation, duration and intonation) are considered in this study. A Flexible Analysis Synthesis Tool (FAST) is developed to modify the features of an utterance from neutral to emotion or from emotion to neutral. The key ideas used in this work are the dynamic time warping algorithm for alignment of two utterances and a flexible prosody manipulation for incorporating the desired features. The tool is used for conversion of neutral to emotion speech. Subjective evaluation is performed based on listening tests. The tool has potential to convert neutral to emotion speech and vice-versa, which can lead to understanding the significance of various components contributing to emotional content in speech.